


for you are dust

by elektra



Series: balance of power [1]
Category: Bleach
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Blood and Gore, Nonbinary Ulquiorra, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-06
Updated: 2016-10-27
Packaged: 2018-07-29 19:10:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 3,554
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7695958
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elektra/pseuds/elektra
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ulquiorra and Szayel survive the war against the Shinigami.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> and to dust you shall return.
> 
>  
> 
> as of 2017-04-13, the idea of this fic and much of the first chapter has been compounded into [this one.](http://archiveofourown.org/works/10618920/chapters/23485545)

Ulquiorra rematerializes into half of their usual form with a violent smack onto the flat, round roof of a crumbled tower and in a flurry in sand-coated feathers. The suddenness of the moment has their lungs burning, both from the effort of encouraging regrowth – and the fact that their blood was smeared profusely beneath them and bubbling out faster than the stone could absorb each pulse from their open ended arteries.

It’s true, that their body is a weapon; it doesn’t know what to replace first, the blood to replenish their tissues, or the pieces that have been gouged out of them. Immediately, from the pain (which is an odd sensation, unfamiliar and stinging without mercy), they can sense an absent left leg, and its corresponding arm nothing more than a bone with scrappy muscles being slowly, slowly woven back together. A deep hole in their abdomen, but not as alarming as it had once been, when their torso had been detached from their hips altogether.

Astride the slickness of their own gore, they helplessly slip off the slab with a soft groan, their slight weight now even less with missing parts. Debris lodges against their spine, but the discomfort is greatly outweighed. They’re uncomfortably reclined against the side of the fallen building, but… alive.

Somehow.

They had doubted the escape would come to any fruition – and perhaps it has not. They’ve failed, regardless of any innovations. Does it matter? There is no one left to give them any laurels for a job done half well. Their head lolls to the side, cheek dented by their shoulder.

A long cast down their own body once more, inspecting the damage with their foggy, closing vision.

Oh.

Some of their fingers are missing off their remaining hand. Some are still claws, but one has snapped grotesquely backwards at the middle knuckle, perhaps in their slide downwards, and now flops listlessly by a precious few threads of nerves and muscle fibres. Wayward feathers hang from their tattered clothing, and from that is only left a streak of white fabric hanging like a collar from their neck and falling past their thighs.

A war dog that’s been chained to this city and left to bleed out.

It’s what they deserve. They’ve failed.

The pain does not fade, but their mind does. A drop of blood falls off their eyelashes, and so their eyes flutter closed. 

* * *

“Ulquiorra, Ulquiorra.” 

Gold eyes. One pair at first, and then two, three, four, five, swimming and swarming and morphing around each other. The direct pull of the universe to a central focal point, a cloying, thick cloud of dust that pours unrelenting out of the mouth of a black hole. 

_Take it, finish it._

_Make it fair._

Brown eyes. Pathetic that they couldn’t have stabbed those eyes out. Ashamed, they’re ashamed, to have been forced to flee in such a manner of subterfuge with their tail between their legs. Only one pair of brown eyes. That’s all they had to do. It was their destiny, all maggot and rot in the sarcophagi they’d been taken up from in the midst of the desert, given eons to be prepared to succeed. 

“Ulquiorra.” 

_Finish it._

Gold eyes. 

A finger wipes the smattering of blood from their vision, prodding without any care at their sclera, but the pain has never levelled to a sense of tolerability, and it seems like a last resort kindness of a defunct sentience now. 

_Finish it, finish it, finish it, finish it, make it fair, –_

– the gold eyes open as a chasm, lined along the pupil with teeth, and determined to devour. It’s how it had once been; Ulquiorra is small, insufficient, beaten against the slabs of a wind carved canyon not for lack of trying but for their lack of musculature and brute strength. Such a petty thing, they had been called in no language but that of heaving undeveloped monsters, until they evolved past those outer limits. Then they were a pretty thing, a jewel on the crown of Aizen’s ambition. Even so, the Goliaths were vanquished all the same. They cannot sense anyone’s presence outside of … 

_“Ulquiorra.”_

Szayel. 

Their recognition is a minuscule stretch of their operable leg and a puff of breath. Their lips are dry, cracked, heavy with blood, but their tongue is woolly in their mouth and it’s hardly worth the effort to even consider remedying this. 

“Hm.” The sound of his voice is grainy, as though stuffed with cotton, but it clears once some instruction is made to restore their hearing fully. Ulquiorra’s head had taken quite the beating, so much so they can hardly recall by whose hand. “So it appears you’ve survived.” 

But in what state? 

“How did you manage that, I wonder?” 

How did _he_? Did he try fucking his way out of it? The things they could retort with. Their jaw may be dislocated. It’s difficult to discern. 

Szayel’s hand brush their hair out of their face, something they’d hardly noticed that contributed to their obscured vision. That’s better. They can see him more clearly now – kneeling before them, pinpricked with a dozen swords, his body weight in viscera cascading from the severe gash that had become his constantly working throat, a rotten corpse to decorate the rotten landscape – 

No. A blink. He’s only kneeling. Faintly scathed save for a pierced hand and what must be a shattered sternum from the placement of a chest wound. 

Though the thought had not once come to mind before, with his inherent weakness and their crushing reiatsu, in this delicate balance they sit between life and a second death, Szayel holds the clearest advantage he’s ever been able to clasp. He could kill them. He could kill them for no other reason than to do it, to know that he was able, and to seize his opportunities. Ulquiorra has never known him as any other being. 

Szayel sits next to them with a bitten grunt of agony. 

_Finish it. Make it fair._

The movement is lethargic, much like when he had sipped from whatever he’d cooked up into needles. Ulquiorra watches him as best they can, their neck sore and their head too weighty to move off their shoulder. He makes no other motion than tipping his head back. His arm is pressed tightly against theirs, like how the pair had sat and lain together many times before. Does he think of that, in these moments? Does he think about being idle in his bed with them? Does that make him hold back? If it is so, he’s weaker than they thought. 

They close their eyes again. 

* * *

When Ulquiorra wakes up, it’s independently. No matter how long or how short it’s been since this last lapse of consciousness, Szayel is still next to them in much of the same position. One hand is clasped over a raised knee, but the other with the hole that extends palm to back is limp on his lap.

Their tongue pushes around a lump of dust that’s still gathered underneath it. The arm that had been shorn off was mostly reformed while they slept, only stitching itself back in select patches around the elbow, wrist, and tricep. The leg comes along at dragging speeds, but they’ve nowhere else to be. If the Shinigami catch either Ulquiorra or Szayel, it’s a death sentence regardless of a leg or an arm or a functioning hand.

“Do you want me to kill you?” Szayel speaks, noticing they’ve stirred.

_Finish it._

Do they?

They had flung themselves into a suicidal lunge against the landscape with only hopes that they would regain their body and not be scattered in the wind, but when they’d considered his state over theirs, they would not have fought against his snapping jaws and his hands around their throat in one last eulogy. Is he giving them the choice?

Ulquiorra’s head jerks upright, muscles in their neck strained so tightly from holding one stance too extensively. They shake it _no_ , subtly, and he hums a vague response.

He reaches up and around, to cup the side of their face, and kisses them on the lips, once. It hurts, disturbs the peeling skin and the minute slices on the inside of their mouth where their teeth had ripped the skin.

Nowhere to be but here.


	2. Chapter 2

“–- Your arm has come in fine, but I’m afraid your leg has reformed at a strange angle,” Szayel’s fingers press into their calf and thigh, under the guise of testing their muscles. “I advise cutting it off and seeing what you can grow next.”

Ulquiorra pulls their leg from his grip, sore from disuse and its newness to being attached to their body again, but not any different from the one they’d retained from battle.

“I’m joking, gwiazdeczko. Perhaps I was hit too hard in the head and forgot for a moment that you’re a bore.”

He sits back on his heels, evidently with nothing left to snark about, the darkness too obscuring to properly inspect their regeneration. That’s something new, another extreme added to this plane – they’ve torn the sky open. No matter how far they’ve thrown their body aside from where they’d broken through the dome of Las Noches, its cracks cast long shadows on the land, slats of dissonance. Stark brightness left in some areas, pure night in others.

Their eyes glow in such low visibility. They can see it, reflections cast down on their body and previously on puddles of blood that had only recently managed to dry.

One green, one yellow. No, that’s not right.

Ulquiorra’s fingers come up to inspect it, prod at the difference, but the arm that had not been seared off was unchanged from its most recent form and only now do they notice; patches of feathers matted with lymphatic fluids and carnage contrasting their usual porcelain skin, and grotesquely long, clawed fingers ashen in colour. Sparks of a sickly green crackle between the spaces of light and dark paralleled on their body, shaking the offensive hand like a burden of overshadowing evil.

They’re stuck. Their body halfway between what’d been a well kept secret and now their small, quiet defiance in the open.

When they glance up, Szayel’s face has twisted into an expression of soured contemplation. He bites his lip, but pouts at the same time, his eyebrows tight.

“You lied. About what you could do. What you were.”

Ulquiorra rests their head back against the crumbling stone. It’s a very heavy crown.

“No,” they rasp. their throat is raw, full of sand and dust and pride. “I didn’t say anything.”

“Don’t try to educate _me_ on the semantics of lying. I won’t stand for it. Not from you.” Szayel huffs out a concentrated volume of breath, and yet still stands in front of them. “If only I had known. I would have –”

“Dissected me.”

The previous look is back. His jaw snaps shut. He’s not charming, alluring, or beautiful anymore. Not after what he’s done – nor Ulquiorra.

“You’re certainly talkative. Did the Shinigami knock an epiphany out of you along with the stick that was up your ass?”

Ulquiorra reaches one hand up, the one that was not so mangled by Murciélago, and it’s much of an automatic reaction when he grasps it, pulls them up to stand with him. He grips them beneath the arms, close, front to front, to test the strength of their legs. A sigh from above rustles their hair, cow licks and fly aways that have fallen into their face.

“Oh, my little Bernini, what have you done this time?”


	3. Chapter 3

Ulquiorra had set off walking some time ago. Whether it was mere hours or days was of little importance -- there was no change in where sunlit patches met the natural darkness of Hueco Mundo, erratic winds shifting sands to no rotation besides its own whim. It didn’t matter. There was no one left within distances they could sense. All empty corpses they daintily stepped onto and over, camaraderie no less damned than it’d always been.

Szayel joined them on their trek, for no obvious reason that he had little else to do with a life now voided of even manufactured purpose. Idle tasks were no stranger, given to him when he’d lost function, countable years into his service to Aizen, but he had never caught on. Or perhaps he had, but been unable to speak of it as he did all other things, not wanting to give that manner of recognition to concepts of uselessness. Proud. But so were they.

It’s some small miracle that his words eventually fall away, and he does not speak as he follows Ulquiorra beneath slats of alternating sun and moon, towers that sprinkle rot down from half torn surfaces and slide into disrepair with shrieking discomfort -- stone on stone. Great valleys and dunes have been carved into what had been Las Noches, what with the sudden availability of outside air and the general destruction of the land, so that Ulquiorra must leap with attempted grace downwards at times, from broken architecture to architecture dotting the plains; and at other times Szayel descends first, accepting their weight into his lowering arms with a familiar fluidity.

There, in the distance -- the throne room.

_You are no longer of any use to Aizen-sama. There is no longer anything protecting you._

The ceiling has collapsed to the side in some places, some remaining only atop dutiful pillars, and the once smooth mirrored floor is now a dulled purple covered in a haze of debris that slips and slides beneath Ulquiorra’s boot. The throne, however, is in tact, and Szayel bounces up several steps on the long staircase leading up to it. Or that descends from it. It depends on which way one is meant to go.

He seems in high spirits, welcoming the extra height with an airy laugh and the sweep of an arm.

“And on the pedestal these words appear:” his voice is loud, echoing off nothing, and with a flair somehow more dramatic than his usual. Ulquiorra lifts only their eyes to observe him, under their thick eyelashes. Good. He’s half obscured. The sight of him is always bordering on grotesque. “’My name is Ozymandias, king of kings! Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’

“Nothing beside remains. Round the decay of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare the lone and level sands stretch far away.”

An unimpressive performance.

_Are you frightened?_

Szayel scoffs and makes a short step-hop back to their side.

“Percy Bysshe Shelley. Before your time? Oh! -- you’re more the voracious consumer of _Mary_ Shelley.” While Ulquiorra hasn’t begun walking yet, he picks up a lock of their hair, twirling it between and around his torn-gloved fingers. “’Their limbs were in proportion, and I had selected their features as beautiful. _Beautiful!_ Great God! Their white skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; their hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; their teeth of a pearly whiteness; but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with their watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same colour as the dun-white sockets in which they were set, their shrivelled complexion and straight black lips.’”

He gives a toothy grin and a messy kiss to that dun-white skin across their temple, the moon overlaying it with a deep blue. Ulquiorra hasn’t the time for this -- for what they do, is unknown, what time they’re aware of ... none at all. They continue their journey out of the great hall and hope they never return to witness its empty, desecrated throne.

“’I was dependent on none and related to none. The path of my departure was free, and there was none to lament my annihilation. My person was hideous and my stature gigantic. What did this mean? Who was I? What was I? Whence did I come? What was my destination? These questions continually recurred, but I was unable to solve them,’” Szayel continues behind them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i like frankenstein.


	4. Chapter 4

There is an ugly, raw thing separating Ulquiorra and Szayel that had not used to be there.

Szayel is watching them hawkishly, his eyes roving over the point at which their right hand clutches their left elbow, which had been trembling and tense a few moments earlier, gone electric green in passing torrents of crawling lightning veins beneath a matted fletching of feathers. The feathers remain in clumps dotted from wrist to shoulder, blending into the rich black skin that did not fade as gracefully all over as it did from where it’d regrown.

Here it is again: the sparks, the searing heat that begins in the sensitive marrow of their ulna, making the limb go slack and tight all the same, a thick and cloying concentration of reiatsu in their claw curled palm.

And then it passes.

Their right eye aches within its socket -- it, too, has not changed from their resurrección.

Is this what it means to be martyred, slowly roasted upon a spit of their own, self created, lancing pain? Perish the thought.

At Ulquiorra’s silent hardship, Szayel curls his lip, and finally says what so clearly tortures his clouded mind,

“ _Jezu_ \-- you’re horrific.”

He has not touched them in any great extent since their fall. Every time he does, he sees the state of their body, and withdraws with the same slippery ease he’d approached, that _look_ on his face taking precedence. Jealousy, they think. Reproach follows soon after, for them, and perhaps also for his own jealousy, that he would want after anything they have, that he would be lacking in any capacity.

Ulquiorra knows him: he is of no better kind than that of Grimmjow, Nnoitra, or the other fallen priests of vice, no matter how unkind his thoughts turn against his compatriots.

“How did you hide it? How did you suppress it? Tell me.”

Szayel’s snapping echoes around the pair, bounces off the small archway of stone the two stand beneath. The endless walking had lost its charm after wayward journeys turning up nothing but rocks and sand, rocks and sand upon rocks and sand. So Ulquiorra has leaned against the inner shade of the architecture, one leg awkwardly but not uncomfortably raised to press a foot flat into the opposing abutment, next to his hip.

He must feel caged. Intimidated, now that they’ve their strength back, and their reiatsu is not as hidden as it had once been. He looks a bit flushed down the collar, as though he is suffering an internal ache. Does it hurt to be near them? How they hope so. Perhaps he would leave them be. His voice grates their sensitive ears, still carefully rebuilding from the inside out.

“Tell me!”

Their eyes span back to him, having glossed over in their train of thoughts out towards the desert from whence they’d come.

Flushed with anger, then. Hmph.

“What -- what does that little noise mean? Don’t **taunt** me.”

Oh. So they had not just thought it.

Everything was muddled, still. Crossed wires, mismatched fuses, a jumbled assortment of lapsing consciousness.

Fine. Ulquiorra will humour him: “Why.”

“Why _what?_ ” he hisses.

“Should I tell you.”

“-- Because!” In his vicious grasp, Szayel snatches their ankle and steps forward, setting them into a precarious balance on one leg while he crushes their other almost to their shoulder. “I want to know why it was you, of all of us. Why you’re so fucking special, suddenly. _I_ have potential. _I_ don’t have to run away from the fights I start. _I_ finish my jobs. You’re a messy -- illiterate -- trifling -- _rat._ ” With each darkly punctuated word, he stabs their knee higher, the unnatural angle of it tense and cramping. “ ** _Lowlife._** ”

How bothersome. He thinks himself intimidating. They would roll their eyes if he was worth the spare effort -- and they’re unsure of the stability of such tendons.

“You mean nothing to me.” Their apprehended limb is a nuisance, but with all the nonchalance they’ve ever mustered, they drop their hips to lean back low and steady against the stone. “Because we fuck? Get out. I owe you nothing, petulant child.”

Szayel seems torn between two directions of grandeur to throw himself in -- to comment on how this is the most he’s heard them rasp yet, their voice darker than ever when clogged with granules of dust and slow healing, or to be radioactive with fury at their harsh inflection.

He takes a swing.

His fist connects with Ulquiorra’s jaw hard enough to rattle their teeth and fill their mouth with a stale metallic taste, but not enough to break skin. When he tries to take advantage of his grasp on their leg -- an overzealous venture -- they take the wide fall he throws them for, but hook him by the shoulder down with them. A writhing eel in the sand, he is, when the flat of their palm strikes him beneath his chin and their weight on his sternum keeps him as such.

“Fuck you! Fuck you, you brute! Savage! _Beast!_ Let me go!”

_Hypocrite,_ Ulquiorra would taunt from this position of exercised power, _what was it about finishing your fights?,_ if only they cared.

So they let him go.

He goes, scrambles to his feet gracelessly and goes.

Their arm begins to seize again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> last part. thanks for reading.


End file.
